Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: For a number of years, corruption research has been hampered by the lack of available international social surveys that could provide insight into the cross-national variation in determinants of individual-level corruption perceptions. Addressing this gap in the literature, this article presents the results of a cross-national analysis of 25 diverse countries participating in the ISSP 2006 Role of Government Survey, in which questions on corruption perceptions were incorporated into the module for the first time. The analysis was carried out by first identifying a structural equation model with the best fit with the combined dataset – taking into account social status, trust, bribery experience, contacts, political beliefs and other factors of the respondent – and then comparing the direct and indirect effects of the model parameters for each of the countries separately. Regression estimates of individual-level level variables, country-level variables and interaction effects were also conducted. The article finds that there are significant differences in the size and direction of the determination of corruption perceptions by social status between low-perceived and high-perceived corruption countries. The article also identifies important interaction effects between individual-level and country-level factors, particularly the relationship between social status and the degree of economic inequality in society, as well as the link between Protestantism and the respondent’s trust. The findings confirm a number of single-country studies on the determinants of corruption perceptions and highlight the need for future comparative research in this area.